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VulnerabilityPublished

CVE-2026-120632: CGI versions before 5.00 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via a backtracking regex on the XForms

Source GCVE Database

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Authoritative record:CVE-2026-120632· High

Not known to be exploited : upgrade to 5.00 soon.

Data as of 4 Nov 2026, 02:00 UTC

Severity
High

Rated High by Threat Radar's AI analysis · CVSS not yet scored by NVD

Thin evidence

One scorer or none
Patch
Available – fixed in 5.00

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 3 Nov 2026

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponized: no evidence on record.

    No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB

  4. Exploited in the wild: no evidence on record.

    Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation

  5. Observed by OffSeq Mirage: no evidence on record.

    No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 3 Nov 2026.

What to do

Upgrade CGI (Perl module) to 5.00.

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
CGIAffected
  • <5.00
Fixed in
  • 5.00
CPANCGIpkg:cpan/CGIOther threatsAffected
  • <5.00
Fixed in
  • 5.00

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

AI-suggested

If you cannot patch yet, consider mitigating by filtering or blocking suspicious multipart/related Content-Type headers or limiting request processing resources to prevent CPU exhaustion.

Description

CGI versions before 5.00 for Perl contain a vulnerability where a specially crafted POST request with a multipart/related Content-Type can cause CPU exhaustion. This occurs due to a backtracking regular expression used to extract boundary and start parameters, which can lead to cubic time complexity on certain headers without requiring a request body.

References

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